


A Gamble in Darkness

by compassrose



Category: Vampire: The Masquerade
Genre: Character Turned Into Vampire, F/M, French Revolution, Original Character Death(s), Paris (City), Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 07:42:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4820951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/compassrose/pseuds/compassrose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The smells made my head reel – perfume, vomit, wine, shit, blood and breath and rot. The sounds, too – the voices of those nearby, and further away, music, cries, moans of pain and pleasure. I felt the entire city crowding into my skull, all its people and ghosts trying to be heard."</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Gamble in Darkness

I do not know how long I was in that room. I wept some little while, crawled about the floor in my silk dress, beat on the door. Then I picked up Jeanine again, held her and rocked her. She was in my arms. She was weeping and shouting at me, cursing me, flailing at my head in a passion.

The door opened. Saint-Simon said, “Sweet Jesus.”

He bent over me and took Jeanine from me. He wore white kid gloves stitched all over with gold thread, and she left rusty stains upon them. 

“Come, Cléo. Come, get up, sweetheart.” He took my hand and pulled me to my feet. My legs did not seem to want to hold me, and I clung to the wall. Saint-Simon pulled out his handkerchief, and poured a little bit of the spirits he carried in a flask onto it, and wiped my face. The smell of the marc caught my throat, and I gagged, and threw up a horrible sort of black clotted sludge. Saint-Simon wiped my face again. Then he took off his riding cloak, midnight-blue velvet lined in white silk, and put it round me.

“Don’t,” I said, “you will ruin it.” I sounded quite sensible; I sounded like my nurse when she told me not to climb trees in my nice clothes.

“It will be all right,” he said. “Now, come on. Cléo, dear, come with me. Angel, little rose. Come on, out the door, yes, yes, good.” He coaxed me out the door thus, as if I was a hen or a cat, not touching me, but his hand behind my shoulder in case I fell.

I stood in the hall. He was pulling the door closed when I sprang at it. “Jeanine! We can’t leave her here,” I cried. I could hear her still, weeping in there. He caught my shoulders and turned me gently away.

“No, no,” he said. “Jeanine will be all right. We must go now.” His voice did not lose its even, soothing gentleness.

He led me out of the cellars, I did not remember which way. He did not seem to hurry, though he must have been prickling with anxiety and the need for haste. He guided me to the wall and helped me over. Below were a coach and pair, waiting. The horses stamped, and blew nervously as we came up to them, and the coachman soothed them.

“Go, Roget,” Saint-Simon said, and he swept me into the coach and shut the door. We were away like the wind.

Saint-Simon did not speak to me as we drove; he sat rigid on the seat opposite me, his face set and his black eyes glittering. I folded my hands in my lap and sat like a convent girl, except that mechanical shivers ran through my body. The inside of the coach seemed to stretch, then shrink again, and all I could hear was the beat of hooves. I thought it was my heart. Saint-Simon was dead, I thought, or why did he sit so still? Jeanine had been still. Why had we left her behind? I thought I saw her now, but it could not be. It was my dress I saw, where the cloak had fallen open – 

“Blood!” I shrieked, and tore at my skirt. “Oh God! I am covered in blood! I’m bleeding! I’m dying!”

Saint-Simon started. The coach rocked on its wheels as he seized me, kept me from flinging myself out the door on to the road. I thrashed and wailed, but it did me no good; his arms were immovable, and he was steady as a tree. He held me still, resting his head against my sticky hair, murmuring a stream of soothing nonsense in my ear as I sobbed.

I think I slept. Or at least I fell into a kind of trance of stillness, and remembered nothing more until I found myself standing in a room, with Saint-Simon taking off my clothes. I would have protested, but I had no particular will to move. And as it happened, he had nothing dishonorable in mind; he picked me up, naked, and put me into a tub of steaming water, then began to scrub me with a very soapy sponge.

The water turned rusty around me, and I shut my eyes. He kept scrubbing, now and then pouring water from the dipper over me. Then he put me in the crook of his arm, and lowered my head into the water as though I were an infant. The fingers of his other hand rubbed slow circles into my scalp, and at last I opened my eyes.

Saint-Simon’s face was intent, and he studied me as gravely as any specimen. He looked at me, and I looked at him. Then he gave a little nod, and lifted me up right out of the water. He stood me down in front of the fire, and began to rub me dry with one of the pile of linen towels sitting nearby.

I felt very strange. But I reached for the towel in his hands. “I can dry myself,” I said. My voice emerged petulant and small; I had meant it to be cool and rebuking. His face twitched, and he released the towel to me. His shirt and the front of his satin breeches were soaked in water.

“Good,” he said. “Here are more towels. I will empty this – we haven’t much time.”

He picked up the full tub, without any evident effort at all, and went round the screen. I stared after him. Some time later, I realised I was still staring, and I picked up another towel. But I kept on being distracted, by the fire, by the sounds from outside, by faint voices. The fine Aubusson carpet felt harsh under my bare feet.

Saint-Simon returned. He had changed his shirt, and wore now a plain pair of brown wool breeches, and dark stockings. He carried clothing, a dress, over his arm.

“Not much time for what?” I said.

“Till sunrise, my heart.” He took the towel out of my hands, and dressed me like a doll. I let him; my brief spasm of independence seemed gone. He had a chemise, petticoat, and the grey dress, like a maid’s or a Quaker’s; he drew it over my head and laced the bodice.

“A little large,” he murmured, drew up the skirt and tucked it up. He took my hand. “Come on, careful now. Come with me, Cléo.” And he led me again, by the hand, down the stairs and into the cellars of what seemed a plain town house, solid and middle-class. It surprised me; I would have expected more elegance from him. This was Spartan, bare.

“Is this your house?” I said.

“Yes. Watch the step, here. Now, here – duck your head, yes.”

“It’s dark here." 

“Yes, it is. That is all right. Turn, here. Now, just up these steps.” He helped me to lie down, on linen sheets. “There you go.”

“But why can I see?”

“Because your eyes are open, sweeting.” He climbed in beside me and shut the door; it made a heavy scrape. He brushed his hands down over my brow, and obediently I closed my eyes.

“There is a pain in my stomach,” I whispered. “I’m hungry, I think.”

I felt him wince a little. “Oh, my rose,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No, do not be.” His arms were about me. He moved, shifted. His right arm lifted away, then his hand brushed my face. His wrist against my mouth. Something. “Drink,” he said. I had never heard his voice so sad. I drank. It tasted like – Like wine, I thought, but I knew it was not.

Saint-Simon moved his head against mine, and I felt his mouth by my ear, then against my throat. He was kissing me. I could not think why. I drank, swallowed, but at the needle-sharp, white-hot pain just below my ear I cried out and nearly choked.

He made a soft crooning sound, intended to soothe. I could feel the movement of his lips, his tongue stroking my skin. His fingers curved about my head, and his head moved away from mine. I was sorry that he had stopped kissing me, even though it had hurt.

“That’s one, then one more. Then I will teach you, sweetheart. Not yet. But at least I’ll not bind you, like this.” He sounded weary, half asleep. The wine had ceased to flow, but he did not move his hand. I slept.

I wakened in a box, in cold terror. Something at once limp and stiff, cold and nerveless, lay half over me. I did not remember anything of the night before, and for a little time I thought I was still dreaming. (I could see the stone box that confined me.) I did not dare to move – I could not have, even if I wished. But little sounds of fear whined out of me, the sounds one makes in nightmare, when one thinks one is screaming.

The thing behind me moved. I thought I would faint with terror.

“Cléo. Cléo. Hush. Cléo.” It was no thing. It was Saint-Simon, smoothing my head with his hand and speaking softly. And slowly, as if his hand on my skull let me think again, I remembered.

“Jeanine,” I said. And I began to weep, but strange to say, there were no tears. Saint-Simon said nothing, but continued to stroke my hair. 

“She bit my breast. My aunt. I was dizzy, but I held her. Held her hair. I would not let her go. And I drank. From her. And the dizziness passed, and then I thought I would be sick. She laughed at me. Prove you are mine, she said. And she bit my throat until the blackness came over me again. And threw, and threw, and threw me in the room. Where you found me. And Jeanine. She was screaming, Gabrielle brought her, she was screaming in her nightshirt and her hair all down.”

Saint-Simon’s arm vibrated with the violence of leashed strength, around me. Still he smoothed my hair, and that hand was steady.

“How did I? She was dead. She was all torn apart. I never would, but I came awake and she, and she. I killed her I think.” My voice was dissolving. I could not help it. I saw again Jeanine, as I had held her, her head half ripped from her body. Her flesh chewed, so the blood would flow. She was as vivid as the box I lay in, as Etienne Saint-Simon behind me. More so, because I saw her distinctly, and Saint-Simon, behind me, I could not see at all.

“There is no kindness in her, your belle-mère. No kindness at all,” he said thickly, and cursed. A great stillness rose from within me. I looked at the stone walls of the room I lay in. Sepulchre, I thought clearly. Linen sheets under me. My friend behind me, but he had done all he could for me. I might go on as I was. That would mean going mad, I thought, again clearly. Or – I might not. I closed my eyes and opened them again. No hideous visions intruded.

“I see in the dark,” I said cautiously. “Is this – customary?”

Saint-Simon did not pause at all. It would take more than that to throw him off his stride. “Not always,” he replied.

“But you do?”

“Yes.”

“I did kill her. And drink her blood. And yours. Am I – can I be… Am I a beast, now? Will I go mad? Kill without knowing I do it?”

“You are not a beast. But you must drink blood to survive.” He sounded sick, or weary. I turned so I could see his face, and for a moment he avoided my eyes, looking shamed. Yes, shamed. Then he looked at me. “If you allow yourself to become very hungry, you may kill thus, unwittingly. But that becomes less likely as you grow older, and more in control of yourself.”

Belle-mère, he called her, my aunt. My childish surmises – I’d thought myself clever, but I was not. I had never suspected she would do what she had done to me. I had never expected such cruelty from her.

“And how old?” I said slowly. “How old will I be? She is my ancestress, isn’t she? Éloyse of France, who had a fairy lover and vanished. Four hundred years? How old are you, Saint-Simon?"

“Old,” he said, “but not so old as Louise de la Valonne.Four hundred years – you might easily live to four hundred years, if you are lucky and clever, my English rose. There are those who have lived longer than that. The oldest I’ve known did not know exactly when he was born. But he was made by a Roman blood-drinker, who came with the armies of Caesar. The sun can kill you, and fire – they will turn you to dust. A stake in the heart will render you helpless. Silver will burn you, garlic poison you. I suppose enough of either would kill you, and to dine from a Provençal peasant will certainly make you wish yourself dead.” He smiled. “There. There. A poor enough joke, sweetheart, but enough to make you smile. Other things, mostly herbs. The business with the cross is nonsense. You’ll meet some of our kind who are still good Catholics, and go to mass and confession – what the priest makes of them, if they are truthful, I don’t know.”

“Maybe they kill the priests.”

“And that is another thing. You need not kill, only drink. The life in the blood sustains you.”

I gazed at him in silence. True silence, I noted; I breathed only to speak. That was strange. “But she wants me a killer. My – my ancestress.”

He looked back at me, patiently. So many answers straight out were more than Saint-Simon had given me in a year. Now, he waited for me to make it out myself.

“To give her a hold over me. Yet also to make me strong – as she thinks of strength. A test? What is she, among you? She is a power, I can see that.”

Saint-Simon laughed. “She is the power, clever rose. She is the true Master of Paris, and we all dance around her – with her or against her. Now come, let us not lie abed and waste the night.”

He pushed aside the door. It moved with the heavy scrape of stone. I followed him out into the open space of the cellar and straightened my Quaker’s dress. Saint-Simon laughed again.

“You will want to do more than that, before we go abroad. Your hair wants combing. Come upstairs.”

In the large room on the main floor, the coachman of the night before met us.

“Roget,” said Saint-Simon. “How goes it?”

“They hunt you, but they haven’t found you. Yet.” If I’d thought of him at all, last night, I’d thought him an obedient, silent servitor, like those in the household of La Valonne. Now I saw irony in the arching black brows and heavy mobile mouth, and a wry affection between him and Saint-Simon. Not master and servant, then, but friends, and Roget had helped him to steal me away.

“We will not stay another day here,” Saint-Simon said now. “The lady is recovered, and I’ll take her where even La Valonne and her people won’t dare go.”

Roget shook his head. “As you like,” he said. “But there are those who won’t care for that. To let the child know our secrets – Forgive me, mademoiselle.”

“No, I understand,” I said, hesitantly. “I’m a risk to you. You, especially, Monsieur Roget – you do not even know me.” I wondered what powers the title of Master of Paris entailed, and why Saint-Simon would do this for me. I knew what my heart hoped, but doubted that. Did he risk this out of friendship, kindness? In nothing more than Roget’s manner, I had suddenly been given an intimation of deep waters, dangerous currents invisible to the eye, swirling around me to the very neck. I turned to Saint-Simon. “Perhaps if you can teach me what I need to know – what we spoke of earlier – I can go. If I leave Paris alone, she need never know you helped me, only that I ran away.”

Now it was Roget who laughed, flinging his head back and roaring. “I like her! She grasps essentials like nettles. Leave Paris? A little innocent like you? Where would you go? How would you get there? Even if La Valonne didn’t snap you up in a moment, there are wolves out there just waiting for a morsel like you.”

“I apologise,” I said, a bit stiffly. “You must think me very ignorant.”

“Never mind,” said Saint-Simon. “She is right in one thing, Roget – this is my game. If you don’t care to risk it, I’ll not hold it against you.”

“Pah,” said Roget. “I’m deep in already, I’ll stand by you, my hero. And the rest of them too, or I’ll know the reason why.” He laughed again, and clapped Saint-Simon on the shoulder. “You’re a clever one. If anyone will foil La Valonne, you will. And for such a prize, who would not risk her wrath?" His eyes rested on me for a moment with impersonal lechery. 

Saint-Simon shook his head, frowning. “Come, my grey dove. Roget, we shall make our toilettes, and go out. If you will help me in this – and I think it foolhardy – then you might ensure, once we are gone, that no one will search this house.”

“Indeed yes – and never fear, I’ll see no one’s harmed.” Roget went out, whistling.

Saint-Simon brought me upstairs to a bedroom, but though there was a bed in it, it was plain no one had slept here for a long time. Heaped on the bed were a half-dozen dresses, all more or less plain, and a snowy pile of underthings.

“This is what could be found at short notice. I hope at least some of it may fit you, and I’m only sorry it’s not what might better suit you.”

“What, silks, pearls? Louise de la Valonne gave me silks and pearls, Monsieur. Thank you,” I said.

He smiled. “You will be as charming in linen as in silk, my rose. I will await you below.” He bowed and went out, and I shut the door.

The best fit was a striped peasant skirt and a black bodice that showed the lace of my chemise. I brushed out my hair, and for lack of better notions braided it. My face in the mirror seemed my own, when I looked, though very pale. My eyes shone as though with fever.

Behind me, over my shoulder, Jeanine bared her teeth like a cat and hissed. 

“Murderess,” said her voice in my ear, clear as silver needles. 

“I am sorry. I was not myself,” I whispered. “I did not know what I did.” My eyes burned with tears.

“Murderess! You will pay, pay in blood for what you did to me. I thought you loved me.”

“I did. I do.” Blood tracked suddenly across my reflected face. Had she wounded me? I turned. The air behind me was empty, but full of a fading rustle like a disturbance of mice. The blood on my face was tears. I wept blood then. Did I piss blood, sweat blood too? Did I piss at all? I tied a kerchief round my head, as the peasant girls in Jeanine’s village did. Not her – her father had dressed her like a little princess, merchant though he was. He had thought, probably, that she would be well on her way to making a fine marriage as companion to the well-born English relative of the lady of Valonne. What did he think now? It would be like my ancestress to have flung his daughter’s ravaged corpse out onto some deserted meadow near Valonne, to be found first by the crows, then by some hapless villager. Murderess. But I had murdered her.

I wiped my face well clean, and went downstairs. Saint-Simon leaned indolently on the table in the hall. Well-mannered as always, he wore no finery to put me to shame, only unadorned black wool and plain linen, his hair brushed back and neatly clubbed at the nape of his neck.

“As pretty as ever. Are you ready, my rose?” He bowed and held out his arm.

“I am, Monsieur,” I said, and linked my arm through his.

“A fine pair of rustics we will make. But here, shall I teach you your first lesson?” And as we stepped into the street, he did – a trick of passing unseen, turning aside curious eyes with misdirection. We went like shadows through the streets, and passers-by did not so much as glance at us. It was comforting, for Roget had the right of it. I had not been abroad even in London, alone by night. And even I could see that Paris, or at any rate the part we walked through now, was a very different thing from any place I’d been before. Rough men swaggered or staggered by, according to their consumption of wine; and the women, if possible, were rougher still, laughing and shrieking coarse jokes in a crude French that was nothing like that spoken in the glittering assemblies around La Valonne. The smells made my head reel – perfume, vomit, wine, shit, blood and breath and rot. The sounds, too – the voices of those nearby, and further away, music, cries, moans of pain and pleasure. I felt the entire city crowding into my skull, all its people and ghosts trying to be heard.

Saint-Simon stopped. 

“Cléo, are you well?”

Deprived of his arm, I leaned against the wall.

“There’s so much,” I said faintly. “I can hear everything, ‘Tienne, everything.”

“Ah, that’s it,” he said. “I have heard of this.” I could scarcely hear him through the Babel in my mind. I reached out blindly, and he clasped my hands. His own were cold and strong.

“Do you feel that?” he said gently.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. Good. Do you feel ground under your feet?”

“I – I think so. Don’t let go!”

“No, I won’t. Begin at your hands, feel your hands, Cléo. There at your skin is where you end, and you need let nothing else in. Remember yourself, remember your centre and make a fortress of your skin, Cléo.”

Drowning, dreaming, I clutched his hands. Begin at the hands. He was speaking still, his voice and his hands the rock I held. I stood on ground, and I steadied myself on it. Then I understood – a fortress. I imagined myself armoured in invisible walls. The voices remained, but they were outside; I might listen or not as I chose. Saint-Simon’s face swam before me, bizarre and unrecognisable. I squinted, and he became himself again, dark eyes regarding me closely.

“Are you recovered?”

“Yes,” I said.

We walked on.

“There are those among us,” said Saint-Simon, “who can see through shadows and disguises. Who can hear a cat walk a mile away, or see the minutest hairs upon a flea across the room. It’s said La Valonne herself can hear thoughts unspoken, and trace the history of one’s soul in one’s face.”

“Then she can find me.”

“Not so easily as that. It is an effort of will even for her, and I think she must be nearby to work it. And if one’s own will is strong, it is possible to turn her perceptions aside.”

We came to a lantern-lit avenue, where a number of women paced lazily up and down. Some wore ball gowns in last year’s mode, and some no more than corsets and petticoats, their breasts pushed up whitely. Their smell was sour, of stale sweat and cheap scent and old lust, their wigs frowzy and uncombed.

“Now,” said Saint-Simon in my ear, “follow, but do not reveal yourself.” He strolled down the street, a handsome gentleman in plain good clothing. The whores called out crude jests to him, but he only glanced at them.

In the shadows, just outside the lantern-light, stood a girl. For all her open bodice and powder and paint, she was young, younger than I, leaning wearily against the wall.

“You’re out late,” said Saint-Simon. And I shivered at the terrible sweetness of his voice. She looked up at him with her heart in her eyes. I don’t know what she saw – the prince of fairytales who would take her away, or the sweetheart she left behind in the village she came from.

“Love, you’ve come,” she said, so quietly I had to strain my new senses to hear.

“Come with me,” said Saint-Simon, and put his arm about her shoulders. She leaned against him trustingly, and he led her down into the darkness between the houses. Nothing, no one there – I could feel it. Even the rats fled their feet, and my silent feet after. I stood in the mouth of the alley, looking and listening. Run, I wanted to shout, run. But did I want to save her?

He kissed her mouth, her cheek, her throat. She moaned, and flung her head back. I recollected the sharp pang of his kiss in my own flesh, but the sound she made was one of pleasure and delight. I smelled the blood on the air, and hunger pierced me like a sword. I took one urgent step forward, remembered, and clutched the wall to hold me.

Not to kill. I would kill her, if I had her in my hands. How gentle he was, stealing her life from her. He released her, and kissed her throat again briefly. She slid down the wall, in an abandoned attitude that embarrassed me – it seemed private, a faint after love. I saw the merest shadow of a mark on her throat, a faint, already-fading bruise. He smoothed her tangled hair away from her face and straightened her skirts decently. Then he came back, back down the alley towards me.

“She’s alive?” I said, more to say anything. His mouth was stained red. The smell, sweeter than any wine, made me giddy, sick with the force of my hunger.

“Alive,” he said, his voice strained. “She’ll remember nothing. Come here, Cléo.” He undid his plain neckcloth, loosened the ties of his shirt. I saw the vein there, swelling with the blood he had drunk. “Drink,” he said.

The skin yielded like paper to the razor edges of my teeth. He flinched, and I tried desperately to moderate my hunger, that would have me rip open every vessel of his throat to let the blood flow more swiftly. He made an incoherent sound, and lifted my hand to his lips. I felt, again, the pain of that particular kiss, as he felt it, no doubt. His mouth was at my wrist, and the pain died in an exquisite ecstasy, his blood flowing into my mouth and the draw of blood flowing from me. His arm about me held me upright.

At last, he drew my reluctant face away. “Enough,” he said. The touch of his tongue at my wrist closed the wound there, leaving a faint mark like that I had seen on the little whore’s throat. I did the same, and the trickle of blood that ran down into his shirt ceased to flow. “Cut myself shaving,” he said, sounding breathless. (How, if we had no breath?) He released me, and repaired his dress. The refolded neckcloth hid the little stain of blood.

“Why do you take from me each time?” I asked. I felt giddy still, but from remembered pleasure. His embrace, and the taste of the blood of his body, was like my fancies of love.

“This time,” he said. “The last time, sweet. Drink three times from any of our kind, and you are that one’s slave in all but name, bound with the bond of blood. Now you must learn to feed from our mortal kin yourself, now that the edge of your hunger is blunted.”

We walked on, arm in arm. I wondered if the bond he spoke of would feel the same as this tidal pull I felt to him, the spinning sinking in my belly that occurred at the sound of his voice. Could I learn, like La Valonne, to hear thoughts? And if I did, what would I hear in the alien vault of Etienne Saint-Simon’s brain? I remembered him speaking of freedom in the great gold-and-ivory salon of Chatombrés. The frivolous, flirtatious courtier had vanished, in an orator’s eloquence and a heartfelt passion. Bind me – never let me be free of you, I thought, stealing a look at the perfection of his profile. He would be ashamed of me, after all the time he had spent in argument with me, leading me to think, to use my brain as a sword to duel with him. All his endearments were only a game, and I knew it.

“What think you?” he said, and gestured. I saw a very young man, a nobleman, tripping and staggering on the cobbles. His satin breeches, the colour of almond paste, were besmirched with the grime of the street where he had fallen. He sang as he walked – one of the many scandalous songs about the Queen that had been making the rounds, about her and a woman lover. Though he kept forgetting the words, and repeating the same verse when he got lost, his voice was sweet.

“Do you think? Yes, yes, I suppose,” I said. But at the suggestion, I had by instinct reached out to the boy. I smelled his blood, its youthful freshness tinged with heady alcohol. I felt his drunkenness, how easy he would be.

Now Saint-Simon showed me other things, brushed me with their grip so that I might feel how it was done, how bend my will. I walked out of the night, and lifted the boy, who had again tripped and fallen on his face. And for the first time, I realised my physical strength, as with one hand I raised him like a kitten.

“Lady!” he said, staring at me. What did he see? I held him in my gaze and my will, and he turned his white throat to me for my sharp kiss. His blood, mortal blood, was at once richer and less sweet than that I had drunk from Saint-Simon; it had, however faint, the tang of iron, of earth and death. But that taste, to me, was more wonderful than anything ever before, better than lemonade in the heat of summer, indescribable, the very essence of sustenance.

I drank, and felt the bright essence of his spirit pour into me with his blood. He clasped me round the neck like a babe at his mother’s breast, murmuring bliss and endearments, and still I drank, till Saint-Simon’s hand, with hard strength, pulled me away.

“Enough,” he said, “enough! Feel how he fades! Now, as I showed you.”

The boy lifted his head weakly, his face transfigured, shining. “Love, come here,” he slurred, pulling me down. Then, suddenly his eyes widened. “Mademoiselle Vaughan! Can it be you? Here?” I knew him. The Duc D’Artan – I had danced with him in Chatombrés. He had kissed me, but shyly, and I had not encouraged him except that I had not quelled him, pretty almost-child that he was. I stumbled back, and loosed him; he fell to his knees in the street, catching at my skirt, kissing the hem.

“No, Cléo,” said Saint-Simon, gentle and inflexible behind me. “As I showed you – the waters of Lethe upon his memory, that he will recall nothing.”

And, reluctant and more than a little horrified, I obeyed, and set my will to his mind. The Duc fell back, unconscious, and Saint-Simon shook his head, with a wry smile.

“If we leave him here, it will be as good as his death anyway. How he walked this far, drunk as a tick, I don’t know.” He lifted the boy up easily, and I followed him. How light, how powerful I felt. The lights, the sounds, the smells were still all about me, but thus fortified, I found myself examining them, recognising each one as though I had always known.

To my surprise, I found we were, in this nest of alleys and low dwellings, only blocks away from the luxurious taverns and coffeehouses of Avenue R------. Saint-Simon left our burden in the shadow of the doorway of one such. “His friends will find him here easily enough, and send him home.”

“Is it – is one supposed to drink only as one loves? Man to woman and woman to man?” I asked. Another crime to my score, if so.

Saint-Simon chuckled. “No. Certainly not. And surely even such a virgin flower as you are knows love is not always so circumscribed. No, it is the chance of the hunt alone that has led us so.”

The hunt. And I the huntress, silent, death if I chose. With blood in me, exultant, I pirouetted on the cobbles, my cheap skirt flaring out around me. If I wished, I thought, I could leap to the rooftops in a bound, run like the wind.

“Yes,” said Saint-Simon, smiling at me, his teeth bright in the gloom. I caught his hand and danced around him, happy as I had never been before.

He humoured me with a turn, as polished and graceful as if he rendered it upon the marble floor of a ballroom. Then he led me further down the mazing streets, to the stinking banks of the Seine. Under the shadow of a bridge he pointed out a door, massive, aged, bound in iron.

“Knock,” he said. “Two knocks, then three.” My skin crawled. We were watched. Though I saw in the dark, I saw no one with my eyes; I felt them, like shadows on my skin. Sorrow, menace, curiosity, power. What if I yielded to the temptation to turn and seek them out, those two strangers? I did not. I knocked, twice and thrice.

“Name yourself.” The voice seemed to come from nowhere, soft yet piercing. I knew that the speaker stood behind the door.

“Saint-Simon. And with me, Mademoiselle Eurycleia Vaughan.” I stood very still, feeling, now that I knew, how Saint-Simon made a third dangerous pulse of energy upon the night.

The door opened silently. The gatekeeper bowed.

“Monsieur,” he said. “And Mademoiselle. Very welcome are you here, Mademoiselle.”

He was the most hideous thing I had ever seen. His face was deformed, as if eaten away: his nose twin caverns, his mouth loose and gaping over a miscellany of teeth. His skin was the colour of a winter plum, save where it had a more livid tint, as if something suppurated beneath. From his hairless skull, long folded ears like a dog’s protruded. Even in the dark, I saw all this very clearly, more horrors the more I looked – but seeking the print he cast, his shadow, I felt nothing so repulsive. Instead, I found a great vigilance for those in his care, a stringency I recognised as honour, a thread of kindliness.

I curtseyed in turn to him.

“Thank you for your welcome, Monsieur,” I said. “Thank you more than you know.” He held out his hand to me, and I took it. The nails were black, heavy as horn, the fingers too long, the knuckles gnarled and distorted. He lifted me up.

“Follow me, Mademoiselle,” he said. “Lost one might easily become in the Undercity.”

Roget’s words of before sounded again in my ear. There are those who won’t care for that. Likely I could trust to no safe-conduct here, save Saint-Simon and Roget and perhaps this one, the gatekeeper. We followed him now through a close corridor, its walls of stone shored up here and there with ancient brick, sweating with moisture and whitened with encrustations of minerals. We reached a place where a gaping archway in the side of the tunnel opened on stairs leading still further down.

Down we went. When again we walked on the flat, I saw here and there in the walls narrow slits, concealed by the rough stone, and knew other watchers saw us pass.

“Founded on another city Paris is,” the gatekeeper said, in his soft yet carrying voice. “Greater than the city above is this you come to, yet little known. Catacombs say they under the sky, or sewers. And risk it they will not. Rats, say they.”

“Mortals fear rats,” I said. “But what of others? What do they fear?”

The gatekeeper’s gurgling chuckle was ghastly. “Rats, Mademoiselle. What call us you but rats? Know we what we are, and fear us in our hole do those you speak of.”

Embarrassment suffused me, though his manner was joking. Beside me, Saint-Simon said, “Gently, Nicon. Mademoiselle Vaughan does not know us yet.”

The gatekeeper twisted his head like an owl, looking over his shoulder at us. His smile was, if possible, more repulsive than his not smiling, but even so the kindness was clear in it. “If know us she will, then look past our Mark can she. Gathered in hall all are for you, Monsieur. Here Monsieur Roget has been before you.”

Saint-Simon bent his head to me. “You must be presented, Mademoiselle. Are you ready?”

I looked at him, and at the distorted shape of the gatekeeper. “Yes, of course,” I said. “Lead on.”

“There’s my brave rose,” said Saint-Simon.

“Flower is she that in darkness blooms,” the gatekeeper said, whether in agreement or argument I could not tell.

We passed through another door, which opened silently to us by no visible agency. Now, the character of the place we were in changed. The ceiling rose above us, twenty or thirty feet high and vaulted like the aisle of a cathedral. Yet this was no man-made chamber, but a natural cavern in the stone, the pillars made by the action of water in the form of rows of great icicles, but stone.

At the end of this chamber were tall double doors, all grotesquely carved and ornamented, attained by five broad curving steps cut into the rock. I could hear the murmur of many voices. The doors opened, and the sound became deafening. I reeled at the shock, then, as Saint-Simon gripped my arm, realised that I listened with all the attention of heightened senses. I warded myself in my imagined ‘armour’, and the sound became a dull and bearable roar.

The gatekeeper stood aside. We went up the stairs and through the doors, Saint-Simon first and me following.

An utter silence fell.

The crowd parted before us, making an avenue through which we walked, to a raised platform or dais at the end of the room. And if I thought the gatekeeper dreadful in his ugliness, here I saw as bad and worse, awful scars and deformities, strange twistings of limbs and body. It was like a crowd of the most pitiful beggars, save only that these malformations were worse even than those that are sometimes naturally born. Yet these people, crippled and hideous as they were, did not seem pitiful to me. Their dark power rose around them like steam, each and every one of them a blood-drinker. As I was, now.

Not all there were maimed. Here and there stood one fully human in form, even handsome. Strange to say, it was these my eye rejected as unfitting in this house of monsters. I climbed the stairs to the dais, and stood beside Saint-Simon, clasping my hands close in each other to keep from wringing them in dismay. Even now, there was not a murmur or a whisper from those assembled, and as they were not living, and so neither breathed nor fidgeted, not so much as the rustle of cloth. Their collected attention pressed on me.

“I thank you for your attendance here,” Saint-Simon said, without artifice or preamble. The vaults of the room picked up his voice and carried it to every corner. “And I call upon you all, dwellers in the Undercity. On your strength, your honour, which I have such good cause to trust.” He drew me to the centre of the stage. “Here I present to you Mademoiselle Eurycleia Vaughan, most cruelly used by she whose name I need not speak. I have offered her the sanctuary of the Undercity.”

Still the silence continued. I shivered under it, searching all the gathered faces there, odd though they were, for something to give me hope. Then one stepped forward. Despite the piebald skin and coarse overcovering hair, the man’s breeches and worn velvet coat, I thought it was female.

Saint-Simon acknowledged her with a nod, and she spoke. “You offer it our sanctuary, Monsieur,” she said. “But what guarantee have we? The maker makes the child, Monsieur. And we know whose child that is.” From all corners of the chamber came cries of affirmation.

I had long since seen this, but she spoke it so bluntly. “Do you think I’ll betray you if you shelter me?” I cried. My voice, too, was seized and flung echoing over the crowd. “I’m not her tool, I won’t be.” But at that, there was such an explosion of mingled outcry that my voice died.

“Silence,” said Saint-Simon, and miracle of miracles, that word resounded over all with the strength of command. There was silence again, but a different silence, waiting. “Mademoiselle Vaughan, you hear the voice of the Undercity. Will you swear, on your blood, that you will not betray us, in any way, word or deed?”

“I will swear,” I said.

“The oath, Cléo,” he murmured, for my ears alone, “is a peculiarly binding one.”

“I said I will swear,” I said again, coldly.

Roget mounted the steps, bearing a black leather box. He unfastened the clasps, and removed from it a short curved knife. Saint-Simon took it from him. “Hold out your hand,” he said.

I did so. And in one stroke Saint-Simon severed all the vessels of my right wrist, and the blood poured forth. I bit my tongue at the pain, and blood sprang into my mouth as well. Before the red stream could drip to the floor, Roget held a little wide-mouthed bottle of curious dull-gleaming glass under it.

I watched the bright gush pour into it, unable to look away. The smell of the blood was sharp and strong, and before that smell, all else retreated. But it was not only my attention that was so riveted to the falling blood. Everyone in the room watched with single-minded avidity.

I thought the bottle would surely overflow. I was wrong; it was only a few moments before the flow slowed, then stopped. Before my very eyes, I saw the edges of the wound, a wound that might have slain a mortal woman, slowly sealing, though still gaping open. Saint-Simon wiped the knife, and replaced it in the box, then took the bottle from Roget’s hand. He sealed it elaborately, first with a silver stopper (held in a cloth) and a black cord, then with wax, and then into a cylindrical wooden case that opened in two halves, all of which, like the knife, came from the same box.

My wrist ached as though from a deep bruise. Saint-Simon handed me the little wooden tube.

“Hold it in your hand. Up, so all may see.” I held it, in my throbbing hand. Then, following his words, I swore the oath, upon my own blood. Saint-Simon swore as well, to hold that blood safe, and not to use it against me, save I broke my oath. And at two places, too, the massed voices of those assembled spoke: “We swear.”

It was like stumbling into some ancient rite, some weird Druidical ceremony. Yet the force of it was plain. Roget bore away the encased bottle, and the black box. And with that, it was as though some spell was broken. The massed attention of the Underdwellers turned away from us, and again there arose the babble of talk.

Saint-Simon drew out his handkerchief, and bound it round the raw wound of my wrist. “By tomorrow, it will heal,” he said. “That was well done, my heart.”

I said nothing, angry, and with him. For what else could I have done? He had brought me here before all the gathered might of the Undercity, into the heart of their domain. Had I refused to swear, there was no doubting that I never would have walked above the earth again. Nor did I have any such surety over them as a sorcerous phial of blood.

He looked at me with grim unhappiness. “Please,” he said, “Cléo, my thorny rose. Please, trust me.”

I felt so weary, and sore from the wound he had given me. But his face showed me only sadness, and concern for me. His shadow was less clear – there was anxiety there, sorrow and trouble. I let him take me down among the people gathered there, and Roget followed us.

Then for some nights I dwelled among the people of the Undercity, and lived as they lived. Their existence was a shadowy one, indeed very like that of rats. Yet if there was not, here, the luxurious extravagance of Chatombrés, or any elegant entertainments or well-born society, there were other compensations.

In the labyrinthine windings of the Undercity, I found comfort and even beauty. If that comfort was made up of a hodge-podge of things scavenged from the world above, used in resourceful and even unexpected ways, it did not suffer for that. The apartments where the Underdwellers lived were cluttered and welcoming. They seemed, one and all, to collect curiosities and objects of sometimes dubious usefulness. 

I met many who spent their underground nights in thought and argument on a seemingly infinite range of subjects. Like Saint-Simon and those of his circle of philosophers I had met at Chatombrés, there seemed no limit to their questions. And the discussion, the exercise of the mind, was perhaps as much a goal to them as the answers they sought.

Yet not all of their efforts were on such airy planes. Many among them were in communication with the mortal thinkers of France. If the gendarmes who sought illegal presses and the sources of inflammatory pamphlets had searched below the streets of Paris, they would have found a great deal more than they bargained for. In short – in short, they too fought against the established orders. I found I had much cause to remember the words of the gatekeeper. The deformation of their bodies was no reflection of their minds – or even of their souls, if such as we had souls.

I hunted each night with Saint-Simon, slipping out of the sewers in the wolf’s hour just before dawn, drinking swiftly of whatever sad mortal we might find abroad at that hour, and fleeing back to the haven underground. It was dangerous in the streets in those days, but we went silent and unseen through outbursts of trouble and violence.

Yet eternal night was bad enough. In the deeper dark below ground, I started to feel a sad oppression of the spirit. I spoke of this to no one.

Nevertheless, on one of these nights, as Saint-Simon and I walked west on the Rue F----- in a thin rain, he turned to me (in the midst of a conversation about cats) and said, “My rose, you are very melancholy these days.”

I shrugged. “There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness,” I said.

“I have seen you, I thought, very busy,” he said. “Disputatious and charming by turns in all the most interesting quarters. You have brought new hope to Paisy. He thought no one could muster an effective argument against his theories.”

“That is only one night. Out of, one supposes, an eternity,” I said.

He tucked my arm in his. “One can only live one night at a time, my heart,” he said. We had reached a square, and in it a fountain, where by day women would come by the dozens to fetch water. One woman sat there now. Saint-Simon’s head inclined curiously.

I thought, _We should have gone by the river path._

I had been practicing that other vision. But La Valonne offered nothing to it, neither darkness nor the sheen of power. My eyes alone confirmed her.

“Run,” said Saint-Simon. “I will delay her.” I did not.

Even on a muddy street, strewn with yesterday’s cabbage leaves and dog dung, Louise de la Valonne was the embodiment of elegance. Her black silk gown was sewn with tiny brilliants, which caught every speck of light like a thousand winking eyes. Her hair was dressed and powdered as though for audience at Versailles, veiled in a cloud of black lace.

“Etienne,” she said, in the low voluptuous voice that had, they said, made Mozart weep, “how ridiculous. I, brawl with you in the street?” She rose, and shook out her skirt. She was delicate as a doll, her hands tiny. She made every nerve of my body shriek with voiceless horror. I thought of armour, of absence, of a darkness so complete it was empty.

Saint-Simon looked down at me hopelessly. His arm, under the wool of his coat-sleeve, had gone rigid, as if my ancestress the Gorgon had turned him to marble. Not, however, his tongue.

“Dear lady,” he said, “you need not play games with me. You are perfectly capable of brawling, on the street or anywhere else.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But who should speak of gaming? It is not I who kidnaps pretty little pawns, and plays at love with them. Is it thus you hope to topple me? With an infatuated girl?”

“If you say so,” he said.

“My dear! And how long could you drag that out?” Her eyes, drowned violets, turned to me. “How long before she looks at the lover who won’t touch her with the Sight I gave her? Or does she simply think him uncommonly honourable?” She laughed, very sweetly. “Oh, to have such innocence! And what a jest, to watch you, from the beginning, make yourself the Prince of dreams!”

“Did I?” said Saint-Simon. He glanced at me again, released my arm and took a sharp step towards her.

“Child,” said Éloyse. “Look at him, with all your eyes.”

“Let her be,” said Saint-Simon. “Content yourself; you have revealed me.” He bowed with a courtier’s flourish and shed glamour like a cloak, but rising, his head bent as if he would hide. His face was made perhaps more awful by the fact that he had not suffered the same deformity of bone as many of his kind. Withered grey flesh clung to the ruins of excellent features; his black and shrivelled lips made the worse contrast with fine teeth; his thick hair was the dreadful adornment of a long-dead corpse, still walking.

“Prince of nightmares,” said Éloyse. I had not seen her move. Her hand rested on my shoulder, parody of comfort, dainty, iron-hard and strong. I could not speak. The tears poured down my cheeks to paint me with blood, as Saint-Simon turned his back and vanished utterly into such a sudden cloud of obscurity that no effort of mine could pierce it. If I had called him back, no doubt he would have gone regardless.

“My carriage waits for us,” my ancestress said. “Why weep? Regret is a mortal thing. Soon or late, soon or late you must have known, and come to me, blood to blood.”

We walked to the carriage. It was utterly black, save for the golden gleam of the arms of de la Valonne, and the horses and their harness likewise black. A footman in livery of black and gold opened the door, lowered the step, and handed us in – silent, expressionless, beautiful as an angel. Beautiful.

I knew his true face, saw it that first night abroad with him, before ever he taught me to feed. It had become a thing I no longer considered. Truly, he thought very poorly of me, and trusted me not at all.

Going friendless into Hell, I let darkness, stillness, engulf my thoughts, the only defence I had. Through deserted streets we rushed to the outskirts of Paris, and Chatombrés. We passed through the grand gates and up the drive. In the exquisite house of amber stone, lights burned; the air was sweet with music. The rain had stopped, and as I stepped down from the carriage, I smelled the wet green scent of the gardens, and soaked apple blossom.

“I think we will go in by the back way,” La Valonne said, with an amused and tolerant glance at my dress. “A woman, maybe, would have thought to kidnap your wardrobe into the bargain. How dull you’ve become, my child. You’ve not spoken a word.”

I drew my gaze out of the tame wilderness of the garden. She laughed. “You had better hope that you have no more devoted admirers, my dear. For I assure you, it would be most unwise for anyone to think of taking the night air in that garden who had no right to be there. Though they might believe themselves well-hidden, they would be quite, quite mistaken in that.”

I said nothing. I had nothing to say to her, and I was too sick at heart to pretend. She swept into the house, and I trailed behind her.

La Valonne sighed, the sigh of one faced with a fractious child. “No doubt you are tired.” She clapped her hands, and one of the silent footmen glided to her side. “I shall hope to see you recovered tomorrow evening. Anyway, it is nearly dawn. Show Mademoiselle to her suite.”

“My suite?” I said. “I would have thought you’d prepare my cell.”

She contrived to look wounded. “My poor child! What tales have you been hearing? Why should I keep my own kin, my daughter in all but name, a prisoner? I only hope to forget this whole unfortunate episode, and I trust you will as well. I confess, I would not advise you to wander about without notice – there are guards, who might make regrettable mistakes – but Paris is all in a ferment, it’s no more than prudent.”

I made her a deep reverence. “Forgive me,” I said. “You are more than generous.” It was hard, very hard to think only of darkness and stillness, to prevent bitter resentment from surfacing. Nor could I know if I succeeded, but I could not give way to doubt.

The footman took me, not to the rooms I had dwelled in before, but to an apartment in the west wing of the house, beautifully furnished even to the lead-lined, painted shutters that he drew closed over the windows. I lay down fully clothed upon the bed, and waited for the oblivion of an invisible dawn.

I dreamed of Saint-Simon, bound in heavy chains, fire rising at his feet. “I never lied to you,” he said.

“If you say so,” I said, and watched the flames engulf him.

I opened my eyes. There was a knock at the door, and Gabrielle came into the room, splendid in a gown of peach-coloured moiré. Her face was whiter than her powdered hair, by which I deduced she had not yet fed.

“Madame sent me to help you dress. Unless you would sooner go out as you are. I hear your lover prefers ragamuffins.”

I stared at her. I put the force of my will into my eyes with all my displeasure. I expected nothing; Gabrielle was, if at the beck and call of Madame, certainly older in her power than I.

She sank to her knees. “Forgive me, Mademoiselle, forgive me! I did not mean it. Oh, do not, do not, Mademoiselle!” I turned my eyes away in horror. Gabrielle still knelt, weeping.

“Get up,” I said, “and don’t say what you don’t mean.” She rose to her feet, unsteadily.

In silence she helped me to bathe and dress in suitable splendour. All the fine gowns my ancestress had given me were there, in the wardrobe. I went down into the salons of Chatombrés in gold satin and emeralds, and La Valonne herself rose from her chair and kissed me on both cheeks. I was conscious of the whispered commentary of those present, speculating on me, dissecting me minutely. I could, if I liked, hear all that they said, but little was worth hearing.

“Child,” said La Valonne now, “how lovely you look. I hope you slept well. Come with me.” She bowed to the intimate circle around her, and we went out of the salons and down to the cellars. A half-dozen people detached themselves and followed us – blood-drinkers all. Their shadows were muddy and unpleasant.

We came to a door below set with an iron grille, and La Valonne put her hand to the latch. Though she had no key, I heard the click of the wards in the lock. In the room was a boy, a peasant boy, very pale and frightened. I had not seen him before, and wondered if he was from Valonne or some other place, further afield.

“You will be hungry,” said La Valonne to me. “He is yours. It is custom; you feed only by my sufferance where my influence lies.”

I looked at her, wondering if there was some trap here for me, other than the obvious – I had not, of course, had her permission when I lived in the Undercity, and fed in the streets of Paris. The ring of people behind her watched us both with keen and malicious interest.

“Thank you, Madame,” I said. I walked into the cell. The boy began to babble with terror, mingled pleadings to me and prayers to God and the Blessed Virgin. Stifled giggling sounded behind me. He had wet himself, soaked the front of his breeches 

“How perfect – no doubt he wets his bed too.” I did not look to see who spoke. I looked at the boy instead, met his eyes. He said nothing, but his face went rapt and blank.

I took him in my arms. He was so young, still beardless, with such milky skin it seemed a crime to scar it. I opened the vein in his throat, drank, feeling the swoon of oblivion open before him. Enough, enough! The touch of my tongue closed the wound. Forget this, I willed him, forget all of it, and felt all the memory of his captivity drain like water from his dreaming mind.

I laid him down upon the straw and turned.

“What is this?” said La Valonne. “Will you scorn the finest morsel?”

“I have fed,” I said.

“You have tasted. Who taught you such fool’s tricks? Listen to me, girl – you are Death, now. You have no room for such mortal qualms if you are to grow strong and blossom. Do you think you do the boy any favours? He will never again feel such bliss as he does in your embrace. Better to let that be the last he knows.”

Darkness, stillness. “I will not,” I said. Was that the slip of her mind, skidding over mine? She laughed, a silver sound, and moved swift as wind. The boy hung in her hands like a dove, his neck broken.

“There is mercy for you!” she said. “You will feed again tomorrow, and I trust you will not be so squeamish.”

She shut the door.Once again, the lock turned over at the touch of her hand.

“So I am a prisoner,” said I, stepping to the grille.

She inclined her head. “Consider it a lesson,” she said. “If you think like this trash” — her eyes scorned the poor dead boy — “you will live like it. For as long as you will live.” Another titter of laughter ran through her followers, who had come down for just such a scene of my humiliation. She turned and went away, her train trailing through the filth of the floor. Those behind her, though, picked up their finery as they walked.

I put my hand against the lock. This was a thing I had not considered before, but I imagined I began to understand Madame. If she said a lesson, a lesson was what she meant. I had no choice, now, but to learn from her.

Thus far, I had turned my perceptions only to people, or things like people. A lock was different. It took me some time just to comprehend the workings of the tumblers, how they must be manipulated — one does not, after all, expect some day to be a key. Searching, frustrated, I understood something else — how to break it. The temptation made me grit my teeth with nasty glee. I imagined turning my rage against this little thing, blowing it apart like a faulty pistol barrel. Then greater things...

No. I had not the strength for greater things, not yet. Nor could I afford to betray my rage to my enemies, even in this tiny way. It must be the tumblers. Push, and push again. Missed. It was slippery, this moving with the mind — very much like bringing two powerful lodestones together the wrong way. I sweated with the effort; I knew nothing but my mind was involved, but I could not help clenching my fists, my jaws. That I must unlearn, I thought. Do it as she does it — a touch, a graceful, invisible magic — With a still greater effort of will, I stood, deliberately stock still. Only my hand moved. The lock clicked, and the door, which was heavy and did not fit well, swung open without its support.

I wiped at my face with my handkerchief, and the fabric came away stained red. Carefully, I mopped the sweat of my trials away.

The door at the top of the stairs was locked as well, but I scorned that; I had the trick of it now, and after only the briefest pause to allow me to discover the pattern of the wards, the lock yielded to me.

I walked back through the house to Madame’s salons, alive with the music and petty diversions of the dead. Madame’s courtiers drew away from me, one and all, as though from an invisible chill.

I found La Valonne in the music room, seated on a golden stool. Around her, the knot of her favoured ones stood. Three mortal musicians played as though in a dream, never noticing that their audience did not breathe.

She did not glance in my direction, but she knew I entered; the slight shift of her posture, imperceptible to a living eye, betrayed her. Her disciples were less discreet. Their eyes followed me as I walked to stand beside her, but without Madame’s say-so, they would do nothing, so long as I offered her no insult.

I waited patiently until the musicians finished the sonata they were playing, to a little clatter of applause. Madame dismissed them with a wave of her hand. Around her, the others watched me hungrily, wanting to see her take me down.

I curtseyed to her, as elegantly as I knew how. “Madame,” I said, “my apologies, but I fear your locks are insufficient.” My eyes upon the floor, I could not see her face.

“Get up, child,” said La Valonne. I rose. She gazed at me coolly, and yet — in her eyes was the faintest spark of approval. I had passed her first test. The next would be more difficult.

“Come with me,” she said, and hooked her arm through mine. It was hard, not to flinch before the tangible wave of jealousy from her other favoured ones. How they hated me! We walked back through the salons, Madame nodding and smiling here and there as she passed.

Up a short flight of marble stairs was a door, decorated with gilded mouldings. Madame gestured at it.

“You may open it,” she said. My heart in my throat, I set my hand to the lock — but my recent efforts in the direction of self-discipline had helped me, and my nerve did not fail. The lock clicked, and I grasped the knob, and opened the door.

I found myself in a little gallery, lined with a dozen portraits of Louise de la Valonne, in a variety of costumes and attitudes. The door closed behind us, though neither of us touched it. La Valonne looked at me, graceful and far more beautiful than any of her painted replicas, though I recognised two as the handiwork of two of the greatest artists of our day.

She turned her eyes to one, the oldest of them all, and as though connected by invisible strings, my eyes followed. Here, subtle obscenity, a Madonna bared a round and perfect breast to a wooden-looking child. The Virgin’s face, fashionably bereft of eyebrows and modestly shrouded in a blue veil, was unmistakably that of Éloyse, her eyes lifted with a seductive mockery of holy reverence.

“You too may be the muse of artists, beautiful forever,” she said softly. “Do you understand your good fortune, Cléo?”

“I do, Madame.”

She laughed and shook her head, still smiling. “‘I do, Madame.’ ‘Yes, Madame.’ ‘No, Madame.’ What a complaisant little pet you’ve become, now. This is not the little wildcat who confronted me on the first day of her visit, who argued all of my philosophes to a standstill.” Her cold hand caressed my cheek, then closed about my jaw, and she stared into my eyes. “Where is she, my true descendant?”

Fear, a sword of ice, pierced me through. Still colder was the icy touch of her thoughts... I thought of darkness, a darkness even our sight could not pierce. I made my heart stone, steel. I fell into darkness like a pebble into water, into unguessable depths. And still her eyes did not release me.

She could not find me. I knew it. She could not read me. The spiteful fury in her face betrayed her.

“What tricks you’ve learned,” she whispered. “But do not grow proud, child. Never think you can defeat me.” My body, that could not breathe, was breathless. My heart, that did not beat, felt as though a powerful hand crushed it. I tried to cry out. I was voiceless. “Remember,” said La Valonne.

I fell to the floor, almost fainting, my vision blackening. I lay on my face on the chilly traceries of inlaid marble, and sobbing squeaks came from my throat as my voice returned.

“I will never forget,” said La Valonne, “the day he came to our house. How my husband mocked him — singer, weakling. But I, I knew him the instant I laid eyes on him. I did not merely desire him, I recognised him — my kin, in soul if not in blood. He did not need to seduce me! I pursued him, into the winter night. I remember he wore not so much as a cloak to shield him from the wind. He stayed three days, then left, carrying his harp out into the storm, and in the woods he met me, coming from that poor pigsty my husband was so proud of. Pah — no more than a smoky tower in a wooden wall, and he called it his castle.”

I knew the tower she spoke of. It was the oldest part of Wickhall, my father’s house.

“He laughed when he saw me. ‘I knew you heard me,’ he said. ‘I have been searching the corners of the world for you.’ He kissed my hand, my mouth, then my throat — ah, the pain of it. That was the last pain I knew in the world, and the greatest joy, in his arms.

“We slept in the forest, and I cut my teeth upon my husband’s stupid peasants. ‘A plague,’ they called it, and begged their priest to cast the devil away. Fool! He came out with his Bible, that I read better than he, and I killed him too, and left his body ruined on the altar of the church. And all the while he taught me, my sweet lord, taught me everything he knew. Nine days after I walked out into the storm, I stood below my husband’s window and sang his dreams to him. He came out naked into the snow, and died there at my hands. He thought I was his treasure, bought and paid for. He wanted me mute and beautiful, bearing him sons. Ah! how he begged, how he pleaded for his life as I killed him. I made sure he knew me, knew his own wife sent him to his reward.”

Under my cheek, a marble fish crested a marble wave. How lovely her voice was, drawing pictures in my brain. I kissed a fair golden man, and pleasure shocked through me. I sang more sweetly than any nightingale, a delirious luring melody. I saw a man, his face transfigured with joy as he rushed into the winter night. I saw horror and grief fill his eyes as he recognised his Éloyse in the angel figure singing in darkness. I saw him fall to his knees before us, weeping.

No. I shut my inner eye to the vision. I lay on a marble floor four hundred years later, Éloyse drawing her nets about me, and I was too easily caught.

“What joy it was, to see him dead and know that I was free, free of all the silly things that bound me when I lived. I left England the very next day, and never have I set foot there since. Even before I saw you I knew you were the one I sought, at last — verily my descendant. All the others have been weak, his blood. All those I brought here failed the first tests I set them, save you.”

The pain in my breast had eased. I pushed myself away from the marble fish and rose to my feet. Éloyse still spoke, more beautiful than ever, and wholly unhuman. I remembered how I had admired her, her beauty, her French elegance, when first I came to Chatombrés. Now, I saw a monster, and I could not even remember being that naïve and homesick girl.

“Learn well, my child, and you will be my heir, Master of Paris after me, as I became Master after Pierre the Troubadour. Fail, and you will die here and be forgotten.”

“No,” I said.

“Good,” said La Valonne. “You shall be my daughter in truth, a Death to be remembered.” Her eyes travelled once more over all the testimonies to her beauty. “What a draught there is here.” La Valonne passed through the gilded door, and I followed her.

Again, I slept the day away in my shuttered chambers. Again, I dreamed of Saint-Simon. Great spikes driven through his wrists and ankles pinned him, naked, to the floor of a cobbled courtyard. I looked at him coldly, and stepped over him.

“You see, but you do not understand,” said Saint-Simon.

“Do I?” I said. The sun came up. Its light touched him, and he blazed at once into ash, but I watched it rise and was not harmed. I was filled with joy. I had not thought to see the sun again.

I woke to night, and Gabrielle watching resentfully from the doorway.

I bathed, and dressed in black and ivory striped silk with a black shawl, and Gabrielle heaped my hair upon my head in elaborate curls. Tonight, when I walked into the salons, there were some who bowed to me, as they did to La Valonne when she passed. I was recovered from my disgrace, it seemed.

Madame herself met me, coming across the room with hands outstretched. “Come, slake your thirst, my child,” she said, and again she took me down into the dungeons.

Today, there was a girl there, no older than Jeanine, plump and pretty. How many eager young swains did she have, in the village she had left? How many children might she have born, if left to herself? How long might she have lived, first mother then grandmother? It was no use to wonder. She screamed and sobbed — she did not understand what she had done, she wanted to go home. Madame’s great pansy-coloured eyes watched me keenly.

I unlocked the door. The girl fell suddenly silent, and I saw her terror, a yellow mist encircling her. I gazed into her eyes. A charming little mind she had, never before troubled with anything, now all shadowed with horror. I soothed it away, and held out my arms to her. She came into my embrace, weeping.

Do you consent to die? I asked her soul. She was not ready. She did not wish to. I did not wish to kill her, either, but I was very conscious of Madame’s terrible gaze. You will die regardless, I told her. All I can do is make it easy for you.

She did not understand, yet she loosened the kerchief about her neck, and bared her throat to me. My heart wept, but my eyes did not; without, I was armoured in darkness, stillness. My sharp teeth pierced her flesh, and the blood flowed into my mouth, her life. She died silently, dreaming.

“There’s three,” said Jeanine’s voice in my ear. “The Devil will have you, when you’re done.”

The Devil has me already, I thought, but I said nothing. La Valonne awaited me, on the other side of the door.

The gathering was full of a brittle liveliness tonight; there was news, and it was not good. Riots, they said, in outlying towns, the poor burning and looting. The talk was of revolution, but it was spoken of in whispers, like a scandalous pregnancy. The undead, I thought, did not quite believe in it. All of La Valonne’s hangers-on were of good birth; so much was obvious. There was no one to give them the harsh truth. The philosophers, the thinkers, did not come here any more. Their centre had been Saint-Simon, and it would be as good as his death, now, to come before the Master of Paris.

If I was lucky, the rumour was true. I rather thought it was, recollecting certain things I had heard discussed in that other Paris, under the earth. We, like every other noble, living or not, would all be burned, by day when we could not move. I wondered if it would hurt.

And yet the nights passed on, and it did not happen. It was no longer spoken of, but it hung round every gathering, an evil omen of trouble. I pushed it out of my thoughts, as I had put so many things lately. Instead, I learned.

With every fresh infusion of blood, the change in me continued. Strange new things arose in me like dark moons. Each day I slept, and dreamed peculiar dreams. Each sunset I woke. Each night, I stretched my powers to their limits, desperately struggling to learn before — what?

Many things I attempted in secret, hoping to conceal them from all the blood-drinkers, but most particularly my dangerous ancestress. I did not know if I succeeded, nor did I know how useful my disciplines of mental stillness were. In public, I was the dutiful heiress, and everywhere I went in Chatombrés, I was treated like a princess. I wondered if all those smiling courtiers knew that behind their obeisances, I saw their jealousy and hatred rise at me in a stinking fog.

Each new thing I learned to do only made me feel my ignorance more keenly. How weak I was! My sight grew clearer with each passing night, and with it I began to recognise all the many strange talents of my fellow blood-drinkers. There were those who could transform themselves into mist, and those who could lift into the air without wings, and those who could do stranger things yet, things I only half-understood. My own efforts became frantic, but the need for secrecy prevented me from putting anything to the trial, save those things La Valonne taught me. At those, I demonstrated competence, but never mastery; I feared her, feared to seem to challenge her. That, however, did not seem likely in any case. Madame had many powers, and exercised all of them with easy arrogance.

Yet, hopeless though I saw my private goal to be, I could not seem to allow myself rest.

 A fortnight after I was brought back to Chatombrés, a message was brought for La Valonne one night. She read it, and an awful smile came to her face.

“Child,” she said, “come with me. I have been brought a most wonderful gift!”

We left the bright salons, and went down into the dungeons. I was becoming most drearily familiar with those dungeons. Tonight their passages were crammed with blood-drinkers, mostly ones I knew to be Madame’s bravos, brutal and deadly. Their wickedness pressed all around me, horribly triumphant.

We went down a different passageway, this one heavily guarded. At the end was a cell whose door was warded with silver, and I knew what Madame’s gift was. I was furiously angry with him still, but a despair such as I had never felt before seized me in its grip.

Madame’s face, as she looked at me, was suffused with delight. My misery defeated even the discipline of stillness I laid on myself, and she felt every delicious morsel of it. She drew me down the passage, and stopped before the door.

“Now look, my dear,” she said, still smiling. Hating her, I did, careful not to brush against the silver bars.

It was not Saint-Simon, there in the cell. It was Roget. I scarcely recognised him. I had never thought such things might be done to unmortal bodies — but of course, ours are excellently suited to torture. We are most difficult to kill, no matter how much we might wish ourselves dead.

Perhaps he felt my presence, for he painfully lifted his head. His swollen lips moved, and sounds came out, but I could not understand the words. I knew, however, what he said. I heard it in the back of my skull.

“Mademoiselle. Please, Mademoiselle. Help me.”

La Valonne laughed. I knew she heard as well. “Come away,” she said. Her tiny hand fastened on my arm. I turned away without speaking, and heard Roget’s despairing moan.

We returned to the salons, and Madame went into the music room. A handsome cellist of whom she was particularly fond was here this night. She spoke briefly to one of her lieutenants, and that was all. As far as she was concerned, Roget was forgotten; he was bait for Saint-Simon, and in the meantime, he would suffer in Saint-Simon’s stead.

I did not know what to do. It was a trap, and I did not think he could escape. He would not decline the challenge; I knew him better than that. Though he would see the danger, he could not leave his friend to suffer.

I think I hoped to catch him and turn him away. I drifted through the salons, and stopped in the shadow of a window. Misdirection, Saint-Simon had taught me, but it was more than that now. It would have to be. There were those whose eyes pierced shadows — not the least of them, La Valonne herself. Knowing that, I had bent my will to the exercise with everything in me. Less than a ghost, I walked out into the rooms, a breath of wind, nothing. I emptied my thoughts, did not consider anything, only slipped silent and invisible through the brilliance of hundreds of candles.

The door leading into the cellars stood open, a stroke of luck, or a snare to catch me. Even as I approached it, one of Madame’s killing lackeys emerged, looking sated. I slipped round him as he locked the door again, and I was on the other side.

My heart sank. There were dozens of the undead here, all gathered to watch the torment of the enemy, ostensibly to guard him. I thought of Madame’s tale of her own making, and of some things it had led me to attempt. I had never tried such a thing on so many. I did not even know if it would work. Anyway, it would be the rankest sort of foolishness to do it here, in La Valonne’s very house.

Shivering, I huddled into a corner, and called up my voice, but I sang no song of dreams. Voices. “They’re here!” “Oh Jesus, fire!” “They’ve fired the house!” “Quick, run!” Shouts of pain. Sounds of blows. With my voice I made them, that and more. I made them sound in my own head, and filled the air with them. I touched people’s panicked shadows with the smell of smoke, and blood.

It worked like a charm. Every one of them, maddened with the thought of blood, rushed up the stairs and out. La Valonne would have their gizzards for it. Dizzy with success, I locked the door behind them, without moving a step. Then, swiftly, I ran to Roget’s silver-warded cell.

The silver made it more difficult. I could not grip it with my mind. It was like the first time I learned to open locks, the wards slipping away from me. I could not afford this. With a main force that left me sick and sweating blood, I burst it.

Roget’s body, twisted and horrific without its native disguise, was like one great wound. He did not so much as move when I came in. I forced myself to look at what they had done to him, then knelt, and half-lifted him in my arms.

“Monsieur Roget! Quickly, we are going.” My undead strength was not what it had been. Bursting a silver lock had cost me much.

“No,” he said. Again, I heard his voice not so much with my ears, but with a deeper perception. “Kill me. Too weak. Cannot walk. Fire,” he said.

There was not much time. My ruse would already be discovered; they would break down the door. Or worse, go round to the other, and cut us off.

“Roget, please. Try.” I dragged at his resisting body.

“Cléo,” he said. “Find him. Stop him. Saint-Simon.”

“We will find him,” I said with wild desperation. Still no sound came from the stairs. A sudden notion struck me. I tore the sharp edges of my teeth across my own wrist, and held it to Roget’s mouth. He tried to turn his face away. I held his head, and as he tasted the blood, his instinct mastered him; he drank as if he would not cease. I fell into a kind of swoon, aware of him suddenly as I had not been before, in this peculiar intimacy.

At last, he gasped, and pushed my hand away. It was fortunate for me that he was old and experienced enough to do it; I would have let him drain me dry, that first time, not knowing what I did.

He staggered to his feet, and I saw, to my joy, that I had been right. The blood renewed his strength, even in his extremity. I stood, and giddiness washed over me. There was a deep hunger on me, as great as when I had been newly made. I had not thought of the consequences of giving away the only thing that sustained me; I would need to feed, and soon, or we would both be lost.

“Quickly,” I said, and we supported each other like a pair of drunks, flinching out between the silver of the door. I took him out, not through the house, but through the more mundane part of the cellars, where wine and food were stored, towards the back entrance in the servants’ quarters. I felt as though I had been thrust into a sudden strange dream, remembering Saint-Simon, doing the same for me. We had come this same way, I realised, when I had first been made and he had stolen me away.

Roget’s little infusion of strength was insufficient. He stumbled often, and spoke incoherent words. I was hard-pressed to guide him through these only half-familiar corridors and vaults, weak as I was myself. But at last I recognised the kitchens, and knew we had almost achieved the outside air. We still had, of course, Madame’s guarded gardens to traverse. Perhaps it would be easier just to give up, to lie down here upon the stone floor and wait for the inevitable doom.

I shut my eyes a moment. Roget sagged against me. There was a roaring in my ears and I smelled blood. No. I pushed myself away from the wall, and again wrapped my arm hard about Roget’s trunk, pulling him with me. We went through the bakeries, with their rows of ovens, and then into the great kitchen, with the long table down the centre, and its huge fireplaces fitted with spits and pulleys.

There was no one there. It was strange. Then I saw one solitary girl, a little thin-faced slavey, hunched in the very ashes of one of the great hearths. She squeaked with terror when she saw us, and shrank back still farther into the chimney.

I did not even recognise her as human; I saw sustenance and pounced on her like a cat on a mouse. She did not cry out again, my starving mind smothering her at once. The blood poured into my mouth like life itself. I drank her down, in bliss.

Only then, horrified, did I come to myself, clutching her thin body. I stood and wept my useless tears for her, my tears stained with her own blood. Roget huddled, mumbling, against the wall. How much time had I wasted, killing the girl and then regretting? I did not know. There was still an uproar above. Did they hunt us? No doubt they waited for us, at the kitchen door.

I laid the girl’s body down, and went back to Roget. Now, big man though he was, I supported him easily, nearly carrying him. My dress, I saw, was stained all over with his blood. “Roget,” I said, “how can it be right? We are still human, even with these unholy powers. How can we feed on our own sisters and brothers, like animals — savages?” He muttered something in response, but I did not understand what he said.

Around us both I drew again that cloak of nothingness I had learned to weave. It would never stand a determined search, I knew, and certainly never hold against the eyes of La Valonne. But I could not, I could not bear to give up, to stop before the end of this, even though that end would undoubtedly be both our deaths.

I pushed open the door, and for a moment stood bewildered. The air was bright and hot and loud. Cries and shouts of pain, the sound of blows and fire — it was as though my recent diversion in the dungeons had summoned them into life.

“Oh God!” Roget shouted suddenly, twitching in my arms.

“Hush,” I whispered. “Oh, hush.” I put my hand across his mouth. He quieted, but his eyes were wide and rolling. I drew him with me, over the lawns, towards the wall of the estate. There were people all about, running with sticks and torches, yelling wildly, but none of them looked at us. Whether that was due to the efficacy of my concealment, I had no idea, and I did not care. Steadily, horribly slowly, we crossed the gardens. My heart did not pound, and I had no breath to lose, but a cold sweat slicked me in blood, no doubt a macabre sight.

There was the wall. I wrestled Roget over it, and heard him thump to the ground on the other side, like a corpse indeed. I scrambled up myself, heedlessly tearing my silk gown. From the wall, I could see fire merrily taking hold in Chatombrés, lighting the windows more brightly than candles. I jumped down to the ground, and bent over Roget’s limp form, not daring to hope yet that we were free.

Up the road towards us came six men, and one of them I knew. He had stood elegantly beside Saint-Simon in Madame’s salons, toying with his rings; he had debated the merits of music with me. Now, he wore rough clothing and carried a blade, and round him was the shadow of power and death.

“Monsieur Cormier!” I said, stepping out from the trees. He stopped, and all those with him stopped as well, turning on me in a way that struck fear into my vitals.

“You!” he said. There was nothing human about him, not in the shadow of his soul, not in his dreadful face, its true shape strange and fearsome indeed. “You, the Devil’s daughter! This is your doing!” They advanced upon me, all six of them, carrying blades, sticks, clubs.

“Stop!” I cried, and put all my heart into it. They stopped, all of them, their lips curling back over the sharp white teeth like those of a pack of dogs. “I have Monsieur Roget here, with me. I have brought him out of the dungeons of Louise de la Valonne.”

Monsieur Cormier looked at me, sneering. “And what price will you ask for him, Mademoiselle? What is enough for you to betray your maker?”

Anger washed whitely through my veins; my teeth actually chattered with rage. Two or three of the men took a step back, surprising me — they fear me, I thought. “Price — no _price,_ ” I said. “Not for a man who was a friend to me when I needed one. I am not what you think me, Monsieur. He is there, there under the trees. Will you help him, or stand here and abuse me? He is sick, he is badly hurt, and he needs you now, now!” I fairly screamed the last, and gestured imperiously to the shadows where Roget lay.

Cormier said nothing, only walked mechanically under the trees, and returned with Roget leaning on his shoulder, but upright. Cormier nodded coldly to me as they passed.

“One thing more,” I said. “Monsieur. Where is Etienne de Saint-Simon? Is he here? Is this—” I waved my hand in the general direction of the fire and shouts on the night “— his doing?”

“Naturally he is here. In the thick of things, I do not doubt,” said Monsieur Cormier, with the edge of a vulpine smile. “Monsieur de Saint-Simon is given to gambling many lives on the chance of one. No doubt he will be very pleased to see both his plays come out so well. Good night, Mademoiselle.”

There was no mistaking Cormier’s meaning. I turned my back on them, blinking back furious tears; they would do no good at all. Red fire-light painted the sky over the wall, and I clambered back across.

Around Chatombrés, all was chaos. There were not only blood-drinkers, both of Madame’s party and of the underground, but gangs of mortal men, seizing the opportunity of looting. The great house was half aflame, and all around Madame’s people, soot-stained in their fine clothing, were fleeing, attacking any they encountered in a perfect frenzy of terror and rage. I recollected that fire was deadly to our kind.

As for Saint-Simon, he would be where La Valonne was. I knew it. And that was within the house, I thought. Only the wings burned as yet. The doors that gave onto the lawn were shattered and twisted in their frames, and I stepped through.

In the ivory and gold salon, there was little but wreckage. I walked through it, and through the blue salon, and the rose. I passed up a short flight of marble stairs, to where a door decorated with gilded mouldings stood open.

“She comes,” said La Valonne within, her voice musical with triumph. She stood in the centre of the room, more monstrously beautiful than any of her images, and Saint-Simon hung before her — in the air, suspended bound and motionless by no chains but her will.

“Do you like my little bird?” said my ancestress to me, turning. “Even he is only the second strongest vampire in Paris. And who will be second when you are gone?” she asked, turning back to him. “Your protégée, my daughter? Mine, Monsieur. She hates you — I have felt her anger, stamped with your name. There is no such fury, Monsieur, as a woman used.”

She turned back to me. “There he is. Kill him. You have wished for it — do not trouble to lie.”

I said, “I have freed Roget. And you, if you want him dead, kill him yourself.”

She made a sound like a great cat purring. “Do not be a little fool.” Her voice grew softer, softer and more dreadful. She took a dainty step towards me, and another. Her face was pared to bones with rage, nothing human left, and nothing beautiful; her eyes glowed like sheet lightning. “Remember your lessons.”

I did remember. Her will broke around me, waves over a rock. She snarled suddenly, and Saint-Simon shouted, and dropped from the ceiling like a thunderbolt. The strongest vampire in Paris cannot hold the second strongest captive and at the same time bend her unruly child to her will.

“Cléo! Take her!” cried Saint-Simon.

With the merest wish, easily, I pulled the roof down on them both. Fire roared up through it, kindled out of my mind. I fled, running through a nightmare of falling masonry and burning rubble, deafened by La Valonne’s last dreadful shriek. I could scarcely see — tears, ash, dust?

I stood on the lawn. I watched the fire tear through Chatombrés. And then, only then — “No!” I wailed, and leapt back at the inferno. “Saint-Simon!”

Strong arms caught me, held me unstoppably: Roget, half-healed and grotesquely recognisable without his sorcerous guise. “There is nothing you can do. If he is there he is lost.” Tears streaked his face.

“I killed him!” I fought madly against the imprisoning hold, but I had done much since I had fed; I was weak. Roget held me easily. “It was my fault! Let me go, oh, Roget, let me go! Saint-Simon!”

He gripped me the more tightly. “Your death is the last thing he would want,” he said, his voice very grim with grief. “He loved you past all reason,” and carried me, weeping hysterically but no longer struggling, out and away from the burning ruins that entombed the Master of Paris with Etienne de Saint-Simon.

For two days and one night I stayed in the Undercity. Roget tried to persuade me to stay longer, but I would not. Nor would I allow him to accompany me when I left. He believed what I said to be only the false guilt of sorrow, and I did not disabuse him of the notion. In any case, the other inhabitants there were keen to see me go; the magical phial of my blood had been found shattered, and they did not trust me further than they could see me, if so far.

I returned briefly to England, but there was nothing there for me. I could not reveal myself to my family, and though I walked at night alone through the fields and orchards around Wickhall, I saw nothing familiar. It was not they, but I that had changed, beyond all imagining.

I made a servitor, just like those of La Valonne, of a young man I met in London. It was not so very difficult. He was extraordinarily handsome, though I never have been drawn to blond men. I do not know what I would have done without him, on the long sea-voyage to America. I loosed him again when we reached the New World, and he made, I believe, a success of his life there. It is as dangerous to rule as it is to be ruled, and I resolved to do neither, ever again.

The news from France, of course, was bad. Revolution turned everything I had so briefly known to ruin. I do not think even the philosophers of the Undercity envisioned such an upheaval. Gossip reached me, too, of the doings of the undead, and thus I heard that it was long years before there was another Master in Paris. When there was, it was someone I did not know at all.

_ “He whom Love touches not walks in darkness.”  
— PLATO _

 

 


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